Co-creating in Participatory Territorial Networks. Governing Innovation to Address Great Challenges

BORTZ GABRIELA; GÁZQUEZ, AYELÉN

Toronto

Congreso; 2021 Meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science; 2021

Society for the Social Studies of Science

The COVID-19 pandemic led to an active deployment of mission-oriented policies in STI and new R&D strategies to deal with the health crisis. In Argentina, we observe the emergence of new ways of doing R&D and innovation: oriented by specific goals, more flexible, territorially embedded, participatory, and based on ad hoc intersectoral networks. These have shown great adaptive capacity to give unprecedentedly quick responses to the challenges raised by the pandemic by generating products available to health authorities. This shows a break in the historical trends of the STI sector in Latin America, characterized by the disconnection between academia and the productive sector, and the under-use of public R&D.What has changed within this year? What R&D and innovation strategies were deployed to quickly reach scalable technologies to face the pandemic? And, above all, what lessons can we obtain to think about post-pandemic STI policies?This work aims to explore current transformations of R&D policies and strategies in the face of the COVID-19 scenario. Drawing on empirical research results on previous cases on R&D, innovation, and public policies in the biotechnology sector to address biodiversity loss, child malnutrition, access to biological drugs, and anticipating preliminary results of ongoing research on STI responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, we characterize ?participatory territorial networks? (PTN) as an emerging form to direct R&D and innovation that assemblies an increasing diversity of actors towards current social and environmental challenges in Latin America.